I found this post (by Michael Nielsen) quite interesting, but maybe not for the reason people normally would: I just thought the “thesis” of this post was something well known. What I mean is the following: a framework like Wiki, Zope/Plone, Drupal, etc, they all have different modus operandi, i.e., they were all designed to harness the power of the collective in slightly different ways. That means that each of these designs follows a different “policy” of community building; while some may think that every single user should have the same “weight”, some may adopt the policy of ‘roles’, where different groups of users have different tasks within the community.

This is not a judgement of value of these different frameworks. However, each of them imply certain “choices” that were made with a given “community building ideal” in mind. So, in this sense, it seems clear to me that the particular architecture of the software used should reflect the “politics” behind it.

But, maybe this is clearer to me because of all those years listening to RMS… :wink:

I must confess that i’ve tought about this (to do physics in Second Life) many times. In fact, my mom gave me this idea way back in 30 May 2007 10:17:34 (BST). Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, Second Life’s support of GNU/Linux client’s is only in alpha stage. (If anyone has more info on this, i’d appreciate it. :wink: )